Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 9
NATIVISM IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN
George Perkins Marsh was America's first conservationist. It is amazing that he found the time. He was
a polymath from the woods of Vermont, who at different times during the middle of the nineteenth cen-
tury practiced law, edited newspapers, farmed sheep, cut and sold lumber, lectured students, ran a wool
mill, quarried marble, learned twenty languages, designed the Washington Monument, helped found the
Smithsonian Institution, served as a congressman, provided aid to refugees from revolutionary Turkey,
and served as US ambassador in Rome. It was while in Rome that he began to ponder how landscapes
around the Mediterranean and Middle East had been denuded over the centuries. He concluded that past
people had deforested the land, thereby eroding soils, spreading deserts, and causing the demise of their
own civilizations. And having participated in much the same activity in New England, he feared the
same catastrophe could befall the United States, too.
1
So in 1864 he wrote
Man and Nature
, the first manifesto of modern environmentalism. His topic pre-
ceded more famous texts from later ecological heroes like John Muir and Aldo Leopold. It was a power-
ful evocation of humankind as the destroyer of nature's balance. “Nature, left undisturbed, so fashions
her territory as to give it almost unchanging permanence of form, outline and proportion,” he wrote. If
disturbed “she lets herself at once to repair the superficial damage, and to restore, as nearly as practic-
able, the former aspect of her dominion.” But any more fundamental damage was beyond nature's reach.
Humankind was the “disturber of natural harmonies,” capable of wreaking change that was irreversible
except on the longest timescales. Thinking no doubt of the desertified lands on the Mediterranean, he
said that, in places, humans had “brought the face of the earth to a desolation almost as complete as that
of the moon.” Natural recovery, if it happened at all, would take centuries. “Man, who even now finds
scarce breathing room on this vast globe, cannot . . . wait for the slow action of [nature] to replace, by a
new creation, the Eden he has wasted.”
2
The idea of nature's balance and how humans were capable of transgressing or destroying it did
not start with Marsh, of course. It is implicit in the biblical story of the Garden of Eden, in which sin-
ning humans are cast out from the garden. They were separated from nature and doomed to damage her.
The idea has persisted right into the modern world, in which our view of nature is, ostensibly at least,
based on science. The balance of nature has become a “foundational metaphor in ecology,” says Stephen
Trudgill, a British geographer from Cambridge University who specializes in what he calls our social
engagement with nature. Ecology, he says, is a science built on “the guilt-laden notion that we have dis-
turbed the natural order, and it is now all wrong and our fault.”
3
But are we right? Daniel Botkin of UC-Santa Barbara scathingly says that “overwhelmingly we still
believe in the nature as described by the Ancient Greeks, which has come down to us through Juda-
ism and Christianity.” He accuses environmental scientists of failing to question these hand-me-down
Search WWH ::
Custom Search